So one thing I left off yesterday's catchup technical news item was the splitter snafu from last week which caused a bunch of bogus broken workunits to be generated (and will continue to gum up the system until they pass through).

Basically that was due to us having the splitter code cracked open to eventually work with Green Bank data. Progress is being made on this front. However some code changes for Green Bank affected our current splitter for Arecibo, as we needed to change some things to make the splitter telescope agnostic (i.e. generalized to work with any data from any telescope). These changes were tested in beta, or at least we thought were thoroughly tested, but things definitely broke in the public project. We fixed that, but not after a ton of bad workunits made its way into the world. We still have some clean up to do on that front.

BUT ALSO we needed to update some fields in the current science database schema to also make the database itself telescope agnostic. Just a few "alter table" commands to lengthen the tape name fields beyond 20 characters. We thought these alters would take a few hours (and completed before the end of today's Tuesday outage). Now it looks like it might take a day. We can't split/assimilate any new work until the alters are finished. Oh well. We're going to run out of work tonight, but should have fresh work sometime tomorrow morning. It is a holiday tomorrow, so cut us some slack, if it's later than tomorrow morning :).

- Matt-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude